On Wed, 2001-10-31 at 14:00, David Mentre wrote:
Josef Dalcolmo dalcolmo@vh-s.de writes:
My point is: it would be great if the whole GNU/Linux system would be ported to Windows: Linux as a program running in Windows. That should be possible, just like any other port to a new machine, and would immediately allow access to the whole rich world of Linux applications. As a next step, cut-and-paste between Windows and Linux could be implemented making this a wonderful solution to benefit of many free software solutions.
As far as I remembered, RMS was against porting free software on proprietary OS. If I remember correctly, the argument was: "Don't improve proprietary OS with our free software".
I can understand that, but like it's normal with free software, someone found the need to do it and cygwin was born. You can check it out at http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/. My use of cygwin was always to overcome windows limitations when I was forced to use windows (fortunately that doesn't happen any more and all my computer has is free software, hopefully - sometimes debian maintainers forget to check if the license is free...).